by R. L. King
“Yeah, I know.” Nick sounds resigned, but I can see he’s interested too.
“You won’t see any of the good stuff until you do.”
“This isn’t the good stuff?” I ask dryly, looking around. The place looks like it hasn’t been updated in at least twenty years, and most of the sparse clientele look like they haven’t either.
“This is one of the few of our places that doesn’t cater to the magical crowd.” Max pushes open a door and waves us into what looks like a combination break room and conference area. “We don’t lavish the same amount of attention on the mundane joints, but they can occasionally be useful. Like now. As you might guess, we can’t risk bringing Nick into any of the magic-heavy areas until he’s housebroken.”
I snicker.
“Very funny,” Nick mutters. “You’re a real laugh riot, Max.”
Max snickers too. “Sorry, kid. Better get used to it. Anyway, what do you guys need? Mr. H. is at a meeting right now—he’ll have more info for you later on tonight, probably.”
“We need magical gear,” I say. “And a ritual space.”
“Huh? Why?”
“We…need to set something up, and soon. We talked to our Nana, and she thinks we might learn more if we question a particular spirit. And unfortunately, I’m the one who needs to do it.”
His eyes narrow. “You sure that’s a good idea?”
“No. I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I think it’s a terrible idea, actually. But it’s also the only thing that’s likely to get us anywhere. Selene’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared? You mean like somebody snatched her?”
“Who knows? Maybe somebody did. Maybe she found out about what we were doing, or that Twyla’s still alive, and took off before Nana found out. Nana’s got people out looking for her, but she’s good at hiding.”
“Or maybe she’s dead,” Max says, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“Not likely,” Twyla says. “She’s always been good at getting out of trouble, too. We’re afraid she might be on her way out here to tie up loose ends.”
“So we want to do this ritual and find out what we can before she gets here,” I add. “It’s a good thing there aren’t any portals in the L.A. area, at least.”
“Not public ones, anyway,” Max says.
I freeze, trading a nervous glance with Twyla. I hadn’t thought about that.
“Wait,” Nick says. “Portals?”
“Mages use them for travel,” I tell him. “Let’s talk about it later, okay?” If Selene has access to a private portal around here, there’s nothing I can do about it except finish the ritual as soon as I can. I turn back to Max. “So, can you tell us where we can get some materials, and where we can do the ritual?”
Nick looks like he wants to ask more about portals, but grudgingly concedes that maybe this isn’t the time.
“I can probably get you something from our stocks,” Max says. “But that’ll take time. Or I can point you at a good shop not too far from here, if you don’t mind payin’ for the stuff yourself.”
“That’s not a problem.” I’m actually relieved—everything I can do that doesn’t put me more into the Happenstance family’s debt is a plus. “What about the ritual space?”
“Let me work on that. I’ll call you in an hour.” He pulls out a card and scrawls something on the back of it. “Here’s the shop address. It’s one of those new-agey head-shop kind of places, but if you ask the red-haired guy with the half-ass beard for what he got in today’s shipment, he’ll show you the part the mundanes don’t get to see.” He tilts his head at Nick. “You better stay in the car.”
Nick grumbles something I can’t make out and jams his hands into his pockets. If I were a betting woman, I’d put odds on it being less than a month before he hits up Grandpa Happenstance for some lessons on how to keep his glitch under control.
Half an hour later, Twyla and I are returning to the rental car carrying two bulging bags full of ritual materials. Nick is leaning on the trunk fiddling with his phone, but jumps as we approach. “Am I going to mess any of that stuff up?”
“No, you’re good. The kind of stuff we need for this ritual is all perfectly mundane until it’s included in the circle.”
“Let’s have a look, then.” He climbs into the back seat and reaches out for the bags. “At least I can get a vicarious thrill from the mundane aspects of the whole thing. Oh, by the way,” he adds, handing me a sheet torn from his little notebook. “Max called. I’ve got an address for the ritual space.”
“Great.” I’m not sure I mean that sincerely or sarcastically. Now that we have both the materials and the space, there’s no more excuse for not doing the ritual. My heart’s already beating faster; I feel like I’m getting ready to go for a test in advanced calculus, when I’ve only made it through freshman geometry.
The only difference is that nobody dies if you tank your calculus test.
That’s a pretty big difference, actually.
It’ll take us about an hour to get to this address this time of day, so at least I’ve got that going for me.
“How was the shop?” Nick asks. He’s already going through the bags, pulling out crystals, candles, bags of colored sand, packages of chalk, incense, and all the rest of the stuff Twyla picked out. She tried to get me to do it, quizzing me a bit to see how much I remembered, but that didn’t last long. I just want this to be over with. I have no idea if I want to—or even can—go back to studying magic again if we live through this.
“Eh,” is all I say, though it did amaze me how many memories the deep earthy smells of plants and incense overlaid by a healthy amount of pot smoke dredged up. Back in New York, the best magical shop was owned by Isaiah, another of our “cousins” and one of the few male members of the family with magical talent, and it smelled a lot like this one—including the pot smoke. I hadn’t thought about Isaiah in a while. I miss him, too. I miss a lot of people back home.
I can’t possibly be getting homesick.
Twyla touches my arm. “You okay?”
“What do you think?” My words could be sharp, but they aren’t. All I feel right now is a combination of tired and terrified.
“You’ll be fine. We’ll do this together.”
“But we won’t do it together. You heard Nana—it’s got to be me, or the spirit won’t remember.”
“I’ll be right there with you, I promise.”
“I won’t,” Nick says sourly. “I’ll be out in the car. Or maybe I’ll go have a drink or something.”
“Hey, I’d gladly trade with you. I’ll go get drunk and you can summon the spirit that might bite your head off.”
That gets no reply.
Chapter Twenty-One
Twyla doesn’t ask me if I’m sure I want to do this, because she already knows the answer.
We stand next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, examining the circle we’ve prepared. “Does it look okay?” I ask.
“It looks great.”
This part we can do together, and I’m surprised at how much of it has come back to me despite my best efforts to forget it.
The address Max gave us turned out to be a warehouse in Century City. He included a code that got us past the heavy pushbutton lock holding the door closed, and inside we found a big, cleared space containing the basic beginnings of a magical circle. Looking at it gives me a sharp pang, bringing back crystal-clear memories of the beautiful, gold-and-jewel-inlaid circle we have back home in New York.
That doesn’t matter, though, I remind myself. All that fancy stuff is nothing more than window dressing. It doesn’t affect the magic. I remember Mara drilling into me that magic is all about your willpower and your relationship with the Earth’s forces. A well-trained practitioner could do more with a few chalk scrawls and a couple of candles than an amateur could do with a full circle made of solid gold.
Twyla was more impressed with the space when we first arrived, which initially took me aback. She’s
not the kind of person who enjoys hanging out in a place that smells like it recently hosted either an auto shop or a homeless camp—or possibly both. In answer to my questioning head-tilt, she waved vaguely around in the air. “There’s a ley line here. That’ll make things easier.”
Wow, that amazes me too. The lines of energy that power magic on Earth don’t show up everywhere—they crisscross in various places around the world, and the areas where they exist support stronger magic than areas where they don’t. It’s even more true where they intersect. For example, our ritual space back in New York sits on the confluence of three separate ley lines, giving it a serious extra measure of magical punch. Having one here should make things easier.
Constructing the circle takes us almost an hour, much of that because Twyla stands back and lets me do most of the work, directing where necessary and stepping in to gently correct me when I get something wrong. She really knows this stuff—even though she’s only been out of her apprenticeship for three years, I can tell she’s going to make a good mentor for somebody one of these days. Probably soon, actually. The family is chronically short of teachers with both the know-how and the patience to guide younger mages on their path, so anybody with the aptitude gets tapped eventually.
“Okay,” she says. “Everything looks good. This really isn’t a complicated circle, and the spirit we’re summoning isn’t powerful enough to break free if anything goes wrong.”
“That’s what they said last time,” I mutter.
“Yeah, but this time we’re not getting two for the price of one.” She pulls a vial from one of the bags, along with a small knife. “We’re collecting and preparing the blood right here, and it’s not leaving either of our sight before we start the ritual.”
Inexplicably, I wish Nick was still here. I could really use some of his smartass comments to take the edge off all this seriousness, since Twyla is in full “all business” mode right now. The warehouse is plenty big enough that he could have stayed to observe from the opposite end, but both he and Twyla decided it wasn’t worth taking the chance. This is too important.
“I’ll wait out in the car,” he said. “If you need me, scream.” I’m sure he’d rather have gone to a bar or something, but there aren’t any nearby. I appreciate his loyalty, though, staying close in case anything goes wrong.
“We’ll text you when it’s ready to go,” I tell him. “You can watch through the crack in the door if you want. That should be plenty far enough away.”
Twyla is careful and as gentle as she can be collecting my blood. First, she uses a spell to sterilize the knife blade, then cuts my finger and holds my hand over the vial. As I stand there, wincing and watching my blood drip steadily down, I can’t help thinking about the previous ritual. There was so much blood then, the image of it staining the walls and the floor seared into my mind’s eye before I mercifully passed out. I’d never thought about it before, but somebody must have had to clean it up—had my mother been given that task? Had whoever it was done it with magic, or by hand? Did they have nightmares too?
I shudder, almost jerking my finger and dripping blood down the side of the vial. Twyla grabs my wrist and steadies my hand until we’ve got enough, then uses a healing spell to seal the cut. She’s really good at healing spells. Every mage has affinities for specific types of magic—that’s another thing Mara taught me. Twyla’s always been good at healing, divination, and subtle magic like illusion. I didn’t study long enough to know too much about what I was good at, but both Mara and my mother had mentioned that they thought I might be better at elemental-based spells—stuff with a bit more punch. I’ve never had much of a knack for anything subtle.
I never got to find out, though.
“Okay,” Twyla says briskly. She’s trying to move things along, to keep me from getting in my own head too much, and I appreciate that. “Let’s finish preparing the blood, and then we’ll be ready to start.” She takes my hand. “You can do this, Bron. You know how. All you have to do is keep telling yourself that what happened before wasn’t your fault. We know that now. It’s not just my dream. I know it’s hard to get back on the horse after five years, but you can do it.”
“Yeah.” I wish I could be so sure. My heart’s pounding harder than ever, I’m sweating, and my hands are shaking.
Yeah, I am so ready for this.
That’s sarcasm, in case you can’t tell.
It takes another fifteen minutes to prepare the blood. It’s not a complicated procedure, but it’s necessary to make sure the caster meshes with the circle. Spirits, no matter how benign or “safe,” won’t hesitate to take advantage of any holes or weak spots in their prison, so we have to make sure there aren’t any.
When we’re finished, the little vial of blood glows with a faint light I can see even without magical sight.
“Everything’s ready,” Twyla says gently. “Are you?”
“I—” I look at the blood, the circle, and Twyla’s face, and a full-body shake engulfs me. I’ve heard stories about PTSD before, but that happens to soldiers, to cops, to people who deal with this kind of thing on a regular basis. It’s not supposed to happen to mages. We’re supposed to be strong enough to deal with it. That’s what the training’s all about: not just teaching us to cast the spells, but teaching us to handle what we might encounter while we’re doing it.
I sink to my knees, still shaking. “I can’t do this, Twy!”
She drops next to me, pulling me into a hug. “You can. I love you, Bron. You’re my best friend. You didn’t do anything wrong.” She pauses a moment, then says more firmly, “Come on. The Bron I know wouldn’t let somebody like Selene get away with messing with her. The Bron I know wouldn’t let anybody mess with her.”
I look up. “What?”
“That’s what it was, you know. It has to be. I don’t know what Selene was after, but she used you, Bron. She had some problem with my mom and wanted her dead for whatever reason, but she was too chickenshit to do it herself. She used you as a pawn, because she knew you weren’t experienced enough to fight back, and the guilt would tear you apart so you wouldn’t ask questions. And she got away with it. She screwed up your life for five years. Are you going to let her get in your head like that? She killed my mom. I want her to pay for that too, and you doing this is the only way we’ll find out what we need. Are you going to let her get away with it, or are we going to find out what happened and do something about it?”
As she continues speaking, her voice grows more passionate—at the beginning it almost sounded like she was saying these things to try to get a rise out of me, but by the end, she believes them.
Deep inside me, I feel something stirring—something that hasn’t stirred in a long time.
Damn it, she’s right.
Selene did use me—the poor little half-trained apprentice, too scared of messing up to ask any hard questions.
She used me to commit a murder she was too afraid to risk being caught committing herself. She destroyed not only Mara’s life, but Twyla’s family and my confidence.
The image of the blood rises in my mind’s eye again, but this time it’s accompanied by something else.
Rage.
“Seeing red” in the literal sense—that’s what I’m doing.
How dare she?
“Yeah,” I say, and this time my voice doesn’t shake. “Yeah. You’re right. She’s not getting away with it.”
I lurch to my feet. “Let’s do this, so we can nail Selene’s scheming ass to the wall.”
I’d like to report that Twyla’s stirring speech snapped me out of my five-year funk, cured my magical PTSD, and turned me into an avenging force for all that’s good and righteous with the world.
That would be a good story, right?
But yeah, that’s not how it happens, because all that pesky “real life” and “actual human being” stuff gets in the way. About the best I can say she manages to do is get me back on my feet and truly begin to convince me tha
t not only am I still capable of doing magic, but I’m still worthy of doing it.
But it’s a start, and if it gets me through this ritual without killing us or blowing up the warehouse, I’ll take it.
“Okay. You got this.” She presses a paper into my hand. “I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere. But you aren’t going to need me.”
I look down at the paper. She’s written out the incantation for the ritual, including a phonetic representation of the spirit’s true name since the real thing can’t be rendered in writing. It looks as familiar as it did during my dream, and once again I’m certain that’s the one I used in my last ritual. I slip my hand in my pocket, feeling the warm vial containing my blood.
Everything’s ready, and now I am too.
I shoot a quick glance at Twyla, who nods. She pulls out her phone and sends a text to Nick, and a moment later I see the door crack open. This will be the first real ritual he observes, not counting the nightmare with the Soul Engine; I hope I give him a good show, at least.
Pulling up the paper, I take my place at the edge of the circle and shift to magical sight. It’s been said that magical sight is one of those techniques that nearly every practitioner, no matter their power level, can learn to use, and once you do learn it, it never goes away. Sort of like riding a bicycle, if the bicycle was made out of the primal forces that make up the universe. Despite occasional temptations, I’ve made a conscious effort not to use the sight for anything since I arrived out here, so I wonder if what they say is true.
All around me, ordered lines of beautiful, shining light pop instantly into being, arcing from one side of the circle to the other, almost startling me into stepping back.
Well—some bits of folk wisdom are true, apparently.
I can’t help but smile, even though I’m still shaking. I’d almost forgotten how beautiful it all was.
Don’t get cocky. That was the easy part.
In a trembling, hesitant voice, I begin the incantation. I want to close my eyes and see if I can recite it from memory, but I don’t risk it. I can’t take a chance on messing this up, because if it happens this time, it will be my fault.
